Can we have nothing real? It’s bad enough that American workers are hammered with 64% of new jobs going to foreigners. Our day is really May 1st.

But American workers did contribute at least one lasting legacy to the international movement for working-class liberation — a workers’ holiday, celebrating the ideal of international solidarity, and eagerly anticipating the day when workers might rise together to take control of their own lives and provide for their own well-being.

That holiday is May Day, not Labor Day.

Labor Day has conservative roots. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland pushed Congress to establish the holiday as a way to de-escalate class tension following the Pullman Strike, during which as many as ninety workers were gunned down by thousands of US Marshals serving at the pleasure of railway tycoon George Pullman, one of the time’s most hated industrial barons.

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The Pullman Strike was one of the most catalyzing moments in American history, leading working people all over the country to draw revolutionary conclusions — including Debs, who read Marx for the first time while imprisoned for his role in organizing the strike.

Cleveland was wary of the response to his actions. He signed Labor Day into law a mere six days after busting the strike.

Convincing American workers to accept such a transparently disingenuous maneuver was a hard sell. But Cleveland found an effective ally in Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a conservative coalition of skilled workers that had opposed the strike.

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Attempts to undermine May Day didn’t stop with Grover Cleveland. In 1958, President Eisenhower established “Law Day,” designating May 1 as a day to celebrate the rule of law and its role in shaping American life. The holiday remains on the books to this day.

May Day celebrates the historic power of the working class to oppose its oppression and fundamentally alter society. Though it’s a welcome break from work for many of us, Labor Day is just another legacy of worker defeat.

And today is hardly even a day of rest for millions of the most precarious and underpaid workers in the country.

Still, for the precarious and underpaid who managed to beat the H1Bs, happy (fake) Labor Day!